Best Practices and Tips For Building API

Building an API requires detailed planning and commitment to best practices by developers to make it more secure, user-friendly, and structured. Here are some of the best practices tips followed by the developers working in the software industry during API development:

1. Follow RESTful Principles: Today REST(Representational State Transfer) principles are followed by the software industry. So, design your API that follows REST principles. Also, use clear and meaningful resource naming and responses should have suitable status codes.
2. Use Versioning: if you implement versioning from the start, then it will allow you to make necessary changes and add new features without breaking existing API integration.
3. Add Authentication and Authorization: it is easy to understand that giving access to your data and functionalities to anonymous users can be harmful. So, implementing strong authentication for secure access to your API is recommended, and based on the user role, access should be authorized.
4. Error Handling and Status Code: To make a smooth user experience with your API use proper HTTP status code for the success and failure of requests. Implement proper Error handling to give meaningful and understandable error messages and error codes to help developers.
5. Testing and Improving your API: Test your API regularly to fix any issue and implement the necessary changes to improve it. You can conduct load testing and performance testing to test your API.
6. Analyze API Usage: Monitor your API by implementing the necessary mechanism to track performance, errors, and API usage. Collect this data and analyze that to gain insights to improve your API.
7. Scalability of API: Design your API in such a way that if demand increases in the future then you can scale your API such that it can handle increasing traffic along with good performance.
8. Create Documentation: Provide complete and clear documentation for your API. Explain the endpoints request and response format, authentication required, and any other important information guideline which is required to use your API effectively and efficiently.

Hence, these are some of the tips which you can follow to build a scalable, secure, and developer-friendly API.

Developers build an API(Application Programming Interface) that allows other systems to interact with their Application’s functionalities and data. In simple words, API is a set of protocols, rules, and tools that allow different software applications to access allowed functionalities, and data and interact with each other.API is a service created for user applications that request data or some functionality from servers.

In this article, we will build a RESTful Social Media API where we will create a backend structure of a general Social media Application where a User can register, and if a user is authentic then the user can create a Post. Also, they can delete their specific Post. But before directly jumping onto that we will learn why to create an API and choose the Technology stack for your API.